This Summer saw the second Receipt Bank Effortless Bookkeeping Challenge. 50 forward-thinking accounting and bookkeeping practice competed to make their bookkeeping process as simple and painless as possible and win some fantastic prizes.

What makes an effortless process?

The competition was marked on five metrics, which form the foundation of an effortless process:

The percentage of items being submitted electronically (by app or email)

The age of the oldest unprocessed items in their inbox (lower the better)

The number of clients using the Receipt Bank mobile app

The amount of time passing between clients receiving invoices and submitting them

The amount of items being published straight to accounting software automatically

The Practice Champion Award went to Together Accounting, from Norwich. According to founder, Robert Marjoram, they originally joined as a way to motivate the team and to measure themselves against their peers.

“It’s surprisingly easy to really undervalue your business processes and model. When you’re working it can be hard to see if we’re doing things right. However, by measuring ourselves against our peers, we can see which things we’re doing really well.”

Pushing for better

The metrics also helped them narrow down areas for improvement in the practice, and opportunities to use new tools.

“We’re already good at getting people onto the app,” says Robert, “We weren’t so good at was addressing client delays and pushing them to submit items more promptly. It was something we had to work on more on during the challenge but it made a big difference.”

“We’re also now saving a huge amount of time using auto-publishing. We don’t even need to check these items because the software takes care of it.”

Better relationships through technology

“Our clients like the fact that we’re talking to them about improving their finances more often. We used to have a relationship where we’d talk to them once a year or once a quarter, but now that we’re using Receipt Bank it’s monthly or weekly,” explains Robert.

The result of that regular contact and personal approach has helped them become indispensable for their clients. The reasons, according to Robert, “Receipt Bank makes providing a high-quality bookkeeping service good value for both them and us.”

Together Accounting has also seen significant time-savings from using Receipt Bank.

“Accounts now come out the other end so much more easily, without the hassles we used to have. We’ve managed to take something that used to require 28 hours and get it done in just 10. When it comes to the end of the year we’re getting the work done in half the time. The time we were spending on looking at paperwork, we’re now spending on doing more for our clients.”

When asked to describe the effect of using Receipt Bank in a nutshell Robert tells us, “We’re saving time and making more money on jobs.”